Adobe Illustrator + Wacom Intuos Pro: Wolverine Vector Art

Aug 9, 2015

Lately, I’ve been working on my Illustration. A few years back, I tried the Bamboo Connect. Unfortunately, I ended up returning it. I ended up upgrading to the Wacom Intuos Pro.

As always, it takes some getting use to, but I really have been enjoying it. I have better control of strokes and a much larger design area. After getting some props on snapchat, I recently shared snapchat story clip on Instagram. It basically documented the creation of this artwork:

For the purposes of this website, I decided to break it down with better looking images.

Step 1 was to draw a black and white outline of Wolverine, which was placed on the first Adobe Illustrator layer. Note, not all the strokes are uniform. By customizing the brush settings to include the pressure, the strokes become more natural and controlled as if using an actual paint brush.

Step 2 was to create a layer underneath the black and white outline. This layer consisted of base colors – the skin, yellow and blue uniform, and red belt.

Step 3 added a layer above for shadows. Darker shades of the base colors were added to add depth and shading.

Step 4 included an additional layer for highlights.

Step 5 was one more layer for detail, which included a lot of cross-hatching (a technique of drawing closely spaced parallel lines and crossing them with another set of lines for shading effect). It’s popular in comics. I also added more strokes for hair.

Step 6 was the addition of a background.

This was just a simple example of what can be done. You can always add more layers for more color depth and details, but here you get the idea. Hopefully, I can carve up more time for more vector artwork. Enjoy!